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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

John Forrester's passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud's thinking and the nature of Freud's discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian's eye for context, Forrester explores Freud's biography, the scientific moment, the radical subject matter of the field itself - sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language - as well as Freud's development of a new clinical practice. Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking - not only Freud's, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished. Freud and Psychoanalysis takes us from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch, to the campus, to film and to literature. This is a slim book that packs a big punch. It invites any curious reader into a field and a way of thinking that shaped the twentieth century.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Cover

Title Page

Editor’s Preface

Foreword

Note on Text

Lecture 1: A Whole Climate of Opinion

Introducing Freud

Introducing psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis and science

Psychoanalysis as theory, method and therapy

The science of psychoanalysis?

Notes

Lecture 2: The Historical Foundations of Psychoanalysis

The clinical scientist

From brains to dreams

Hypnotism and hysteria

The case of Anna O

Towards psychoanalysis

Notes

Lecture 3: Dreams and Sexuality

The seduction theory

Dreams and the wish theory

Sexuality

The theory of sexuality

Notes

Lecture 4: Psychoanalysis as a Theory of Culture

Towards a universal theory: dreams, literature and myth

Religion and civilization

Notes

Lecture 5: Psychoanalysis as an International Movement

The international dissemination of psychoanalysis

The First World War and its aftermath

National cultures of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis in Britain

Notes

Lecture 6: The Significance of Psychoanalysis in the Twentieth Century

The progressive politics of psychoanalysis

The conservatism of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis as liberalism

Psychoanalysis and culture

Psychoanalysis and modernity

Notes

Editor’s Postscript

Note

List of Illustrations

Lecture 3

Figure 1

Diagram from Patricia Kitcher, Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Study…

Figure 2

Diagram from Patricia Kitcher, Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Study…

Figure 3

Freud’s map of sexuality

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Editor’s Preface

Foreword

Note on Text

Begin Reading

Editor’s Postscript

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Freud and Psychoanalysis

Six Introductory Lectures

JOHN FORRESTER

Edited by Lisa Appignanesi

Foreword by Darian Leader

polity

The right of John Forrester to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5813-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948656

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud,’ copyright 1940 and © renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. and Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Editor’s Preface

John Forrester knew his Freud backwards. That not only included the twenty-four volumes of the Standard Edition in English, the German originals and sometimes the French translations. It also included the voluminous correspondence that Freud engaged in with any number of friends and fellow practitioners, commentaries on Freud and Freudian history in various languages, the history of psychoanalysis and its migrations around the world. He followed the thinking that Freud provoked, from the work of Jacques Lacan, to Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, to French philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, to literary theory, cultural studies and feminism.

But unusually for a scholar of Freud and psychoanalysis, Forrester was also a historian and philosopher of science. He had started his studies as a laboratory chemist – not that he stayed in the laboratory for very long (though the interest did last long enough to show traces in his first graduate papers for the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, at Princeton). At the University of Cambridge’s renowned History and Philosophy of Science Department, where he spent most of his academic life, and which he headed from 2007 to 2013, Forrester was immersed in the various cross-over fields the subject covered, from the history of medicine and psychiatry and biomedical sciences to the emerging sciences, to the philosophies that accompany the ways we understand them, from Descartes to Wittgenstein to Austin, to name but a few signposts.

It is this last emphasis that makes Forrester’s own thinking about Freud and psychoanalysis rare, as his books attest. Perhaps it also allowed him to see how Freud’s own insistence on his role as a scientist, so much disputed, had more than a grain of historical truth in it.

Forrester was, dare I say, brilliant, often witty, and he certainly liked to provoke. I wish I could add to these many and luminous talents an ability reliably to switch on a tape recorder. Though he delivered many lectures over many decades, to students, colleagues and the general public, the introductory lectures reproduced in this book, on Freud and psychoanalysis, were, bar one other, the only ones recorded. On occasion, they also failed to fully record.

What follows in this collection are the reconstructions of the lectures Forrester offered annually to his undergraduate students. Forrester first taught Freud in 1974. For the next decade, in his teaching, he sought to introduce a Freud that could be as at home within the history of science as in literature. This meant approaching Freud in an unusually interdisciplinary way. He taught Freud and social theory, and psychoanalysis and femininity to students in the social and political sciences; Freud and Lacan in the faculties of English and modern languages; and Freud and the history of psychiatry in the Department of Experimental Psychology, and Natural Sciences Tripos. After taking up a permanent position in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Forrester continued teaching a wide range of classes: on Darwin and Darwinism; the history of thermodynamics; Bachelard and Foucault; gender and science; the history of psychiatry; science and the history of the world; the history of the human sciences; heat, chance and psychoanalysis – to name but a few. He is probably the only person to have ever lectured on writing and the unconscious to students of literature and on the history of modern sexual science to students of anatomy. Suffice to say, Forrester’s lectures were vast in their range and erudite in their coverage. It is this interdisciplinary nature of Forrester’s account of Freud and psychoanalysis that makes what follows so illuminating and so distinctive as an introductory text.

The lectures collected here were delivered in Michaelmas Term 2012. Forrester had a habit of lecturing from bullet points (and, later, power point slides). He wrote no scripts. And though notes survive – and can be consulted in Forrester’s papers (held at the Manuscript Division in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex) – they cannot be fully reconstructed. Only these lectures can be posthumously published.

A brief further note on the text. It was our daughter, Katrina Forrester, who urged me to put her father’s lectures into publishable shape. I was greatly helped in preparing what follows by Tasha Pick, who, with great flair, undertook the initial labour of transcription, which included the first hurdles of turning speech into prose. I took the task over from there, editing, adding material from notes, sometimes being driven to juggle, insert or write a few lines to carry the sense. Katrina then read and edited a draft of the full manuscript, checking against the recordings to ensure that it was faithful to the original spoken lectures, and helping to reconstruct the meaning of John’s more elliptical notes and claims. Her help has been invaluable. John and I had worked, even written a book, together before, so I trust I haven’t traduced his sense, or not too much. He would have smiled happily at the thought of his daughter’s help and I imagine had a moment of proud wonder that all those dinner table arguments could have contributed to this volume. He would also have been extremely grateful, as am I, to Dany Nobus who helped with Lacan, and to Darian Leader for his spirited Foreword, which so well captures John’s intellectual style.

In what follows, much has been preserved from the original spoken lectures – tangents, free associations and all. Where there is a significant departure from the recording or his notes, it is mentioned in the endnotes.

I hope that what follows is a pleasure to read and also proves thought-provoking to anyone interested in Freud and psychoanalysis and their role in shaping our world. Freud’s great invention – that talking and listening technology of two – plays its part in our times. It’s as well to understand a little more about it – which is what the following pages help us to do.

Lisa Appignanesi

Foreword

A survey of Freud’s work and its impact on twentieth-century thought ought to be the subject of a multivolume compendium, complete with thousands of pages and a list of references like a telephone directory. Yet here is a short book, made up of six lectures for undergraduates, that manages not only to provide an effortless introduction to Freud and his impact, but also to raise key questions about the methods, aims and status of psychoanalysis as both a scientific endeavour and a clinical practice.

John Forrester’s grasp of Freud was celebrated. He had authored a pioneering study on the place of language in the origins of psychoanalysis, followed by a series of books and articles on the history of psychoanalysis and the role of speech and truth games in analytic practice and in the world of psychoanalysts. These were unusual works, bringing together the eye of the historian of science with a curiosity about gossip and bluffing, and, more generally, the sociology of the analytic world.

The scope of the lectures reflects these interests: Freud’s theories are linked to the conceptual and ideological backgrounds of his time, as well as to biographical and cultural questions. Darwin and Meynert are here, but also Auden, Hitchcock and D. M. Thomas. Forrester shows not only how Freud helped shape twentieth-century views of infancy and childhood, sexuality and femininity, but also how some of his ideas were contested or reformulated by later thinkers. To do all this in such a slim and agile volume is quite an achievement.

Forrester returns several times in these lectures to the work of the anthropologist Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, which explores the links between psychoanalysis and religion as belief systems. I remember attending the seminars at which Gellner first elaborated these ideas, with Forrester interrupting frequently to challenge or nuance Gellner’s arguments. To the calculation that most of the world’s population could have been analysed by 1980, assuming that a personal analysis could produce a practitioner of psychoanalysis who would then go on to analyse others, Forrester asked Gellner if he had any evidence that this was not in fact the case. As he gently and humorously pursued this dialogue, he showed how generalizations and ‘facts’ had to be approached critically, and how knowledge claims were always open to question.

This dialectical approach to learning shared something with that of Thomas Kuhn, with whom Forrester had studied as a graduate student. When Kuhn was stuck in his own doctoral dissertation on Copernican physics, he was in analysis, and explained later that it was the analytic work that allowed him to make his breakthrough: rather than searching for the coherence of the Copernican system, he realized that he should be looking for contradictions and inconsistencies in this system. Like the symptoms and slips that appear in analysis, these were the fault lines that would reveal what the underlying questions really were for Copernicus.

This was certainly Forrester’s style, evident in these lectures, his writings and his conversations. He would push and probe a received opinion to see where it led, bringing in new data and insights to explore what in a belief system was only belief and what, in contrast, was perhaps something else. And this had a strange and rather unusual effect: in contrast to just about every other Freud scholar on the planet, it was never clear whether he was ‘for’ or ‘against’.

Although such polarizations are ultimately unhelpful, and tend to generate reductionisms, people who devote their lives to the study of psychoanalysis are almost always either believers or iconoclasts. This becomes clear after a few pages of text or a few minutes of conversation, but this was never the case with Forrester. His passion and enthusiasm for Freud scholarship and the study of psychoanalysis was resolute and intractable, and yet he maintained right until the end less a critical distance than what we should term a critical engagement. Everyone who knew him could learn from this, and not a little of this style is present in these lectures.

Lacan famously opened his ‘Écrits’ by citing Buffon: ‘Le style, c’est l’homme’. But Freud had corrected this many years previously, when he quipped ‘Le style, c’est l’histoire de l’homme’. Just as psychoanalysis has taught us never to neglect human history and the vicissitudes of an individual life, so Forrester shows right through his work the importance of the past and how, for the Freudian century, it has played a part in shaping the future.

Darian Leader

Note on Text

All quotations from Freud, letters apart, come from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74). This is abbreviated after quotations to SE plus volume and page number.

Lecture 1A Whole Climate of Opinion

Introducing Freud

I want to begin this lecture series with a much-quoted passage from W. H. Auden’s poem, composed on hearing of Freud’s death in 1939:

If often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

to us he is no more a person

now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help1

This passage brings into focus the idea that we inhabit a Freudian universe. Freud is the very climate in which we conduct our lives. He is pervasive in our culture. We cannot imagine an alternative way of seeing the world – even or perhaps especially when the Freudian origin of our views is lost or obscured. His work saturates our ways of seeing and thinking. In this sense, Freud can be compared with Copernicus or Darwin. The analogy is one Freud himself made in talking about the revolutions which had shaken man’s sense of his own central place in the universe. Though Freud’s status amongst these influential figures is contested, psychoanalysis, with its insistence on an unconscious life of which reason is only sporadically aware, did aim a bitter blow at our sense of being ‘masters’ in our own house. For Freud, the rational subject is at the mercy both of an unpredictable unconscious and the occluded memories from earliest life that shape him. Freud put the point in the following way in his Introductory Lectures:

Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psycho-analysts were not the first and not the only ones to utter this call to introspection; but it seems to be our fate to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual. (SE XVI: 284)

How did Freud conceive of his own project? On 7 December 1938, just nine months before his death, the BBC recorded Freud in his new home in London:

Im Alter von 82 Jahren verließ ich in Folge der deutschen Invasion mein Heim in Wien und kam nach England, wo ich mein Leben in Freiheit zu enden hoffe … My name is Sigmund Freud.

[At the age of 82, I fled my home in Vienna as a result of the German invasion and came to England, where I hope to end my life in freedom.]

The rest of the archive clip of the speaking Freud is in his remarkably good English, undoubtedly honed in listening to a substantial number of English and American patients over his practising lifetime:

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over.2

Freud’s combative and ambitious tone is unmistakable here. The word ‘unsavoury’ is perhaps particularly revealing and well chosen in the context: it implies a sensuous, bodily relationship to theory. This is something Freud emphasized throughout his work.

How might we understand Freud today? The vast scope of his work and interests is evident in the numerous epithets that might be used to describe him: scientist, doctor, inventor, cultural critic, writer, moral exemplar, scientific entrepreneur. Freud thought of himself straightforwardly as a scientist. ‘What else could I be?’, he asked. His first ambitions lay in research, but needs demanded a profession that would allow him to subsidize his parental family, then marry and make his own. He qualified as a doctor in 1881 with a medical degree from the University of Vienna. In 1886, he opened his first consulting-room practice, moving to the now famous Berggasse 19 in 1891, where he worked and lived with his family for the next forty-seven years before fleeing to London. There, at Maresfield Gardens, he continued to see patients until death overtook him in September 1939. His invention of the ‘talking cure’, with his earliest mentor Josef Breuer and at the inspiration of the first patients, the ‘hysterics’ he called his teachers, forms the core of what would become the psychotherapeutic industry.

Freud was also a cultural and social critic of some importance, particularly in later works such as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) – an essay on the inevitable conflict between individual desires and the restrictions civilization imposes – which remains a key text in courses throughout the Western world. Freud never received a Nobel Prize for either science or literature – unlike his contemporaries Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill – a fact perhaps surprising given the significant impact of his work. He was however a wonderful writer, is still a bestseller amongst the classics, and did receive the Goethe Prize for Literature in 1930.3

Disagreements about Freud’s moral character as well as his reputation have long been in play. By some, he is seen as a moral exemplar – a good doctor: steadfast, stoical, humorous, in relation to his patients and in his personal life. His private correspondence, as well as his psychoanalytic writings and the memoirs of patients, give much evidence of this. As an approach to the legacy of his work, however, the emphasis on his moral exemplarity has often served as an invitation to his critics. These characterize Freud as a liar, a fraud and a cheat, and invoke such attributed failings to reject the whole of psychoanalysis. In this way, an attack on the character of the founder of psychoanalysis becomes an attack on the whole edifice of psychoanalysis, its theory and practice. An illustrative parallel can be drawn, perhaps, with the American physicist Robert Millikan, whose experiments to determine the electric charge of the electron were later partly discredited due to fraud allegations.4 If Millikan were treated in the same way that Freud is, the fact that Millikan fudged some of his data would enable critics to argue that the electron itself did not exist. These are the kind of arguments that are made beginning from Freud’s moral exemplarity: yet if he fudged or truncated a case history, does it really follow that the unconscious or repression do not exist?

As for Freud’s status as scientific entrepreneur, that is undeniable. Freud built up an International Psychoanalytic Association with many thousands of members around the world, creating in the process a market for therapy. But if Freud was an entrepreneurial inventor, what kind of invention was psychoanalysis? It was one that grew organically out of Freud’s medical practice. At the beginning of his career, Freud wrote for his colleagues. He had a medical readership in mind. Though medicine itself was not a science, it intersected with many sciences and neurology, and with the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, both of which were going through complicated and important periods of growth in the late nineteenth century. Freud’s psychoanalysis represented a contribution to the development of psychology. But his work also fell under the field of psychiatry, though in a complex way. The term ‘psychiatry’ was first used in German in the early nineteenth century and came to have a very specific set of meanings by its close. Freud’s psychiatric work consisted both in working with patients during a two-year stint as a hospital doctor, and as a leading scientific researcher. Put very bluntly, psychiatry, for Freud, means brains, not minds; it also means the kind of diagnostic classification used in large-scale confining institutions. Freud’s medical practice initially intersected with the brain sciences so in vogue in his day and in our own. But though he loved his work as a brain scientist, Freud ended up following a different route: within medicine, he became a specialist in mental and nervous disorders, as they were then described in English.

Introducing psychoanalysis

As psychoanalysis grew, particularly from 1900 onwards, it developed relationships to wider elite scientific and social movements. I mention the social and the scientific in the same breath to point out that psychoanalysis was very quickly of interest to artistic and cultural figures in Vienna and elsewhere. Psychoanalysis became closely connected not only with new scientific developments, but with cultural, even political, revolutions. It broadened out to encompass a complicated set of ideas and practices, becoming a movement that would even be described as a secular religion. This is the formula put forward by Ernest Gellner, an outstanding anthropologist, in his book The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985). Gellner proposes that psychoanalysis performs a similar function to religion, but without its trappings, since it is essentially scientific. This prompts the question: under what circumstances does science become a religion? Is psychoanalysis a good example of this? Does it teach us something about how science becomes religion? Or is there a necessary immiscibility between science and religion, like oil and water, existing in parallel worlds but unable to mix?

At the core of psychoanalysis are two crucial concepts: therapy and sex, or what Freud called libido. I want to give a sense of how this might work at the most basic of levels today with an anecdote from a clinical practitioner whom I’ve known for a very long time – a medically qualified psychiatrist and practising psychoanalyst who was working in an NHS hospital at the time of this story. As an analyst, he was treated as an eccentric outsider, the lowest of the low in terms of the hospital’s pecking order. He was referred a case of a severely depressed farmer who had been treated with all the modern methods: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which was then meant to be the best treatment for endogenous depression; antidepressants; and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is what the NHS now routinely prescribes as therapy. The patient was finally turned over to the psychoanalyst as a form of baiting the enemy.

The analyst established that the patient’s depression had come on a short time after the death of his wife following a long illness. When she was dying, his wife had said: ‘You must never go with another woman.’ Some weeks after her death, the farmer began to experience disturbed sleep, including sleepwalking. He told his analyst that during one of his sleepwalking episodes, he’d woken up to find himself in the barn having sexual intercourse with a pig. At this point, the analyst said: ‘You reacted to your wife’s death with an inner determination to fulfil her dying wishes. But you don’t have to.’ The effect of this intervention on the patient was striking and undeniable, much to the amazement of the orthodox psychiatrists, who had been oblivious to this story because they don’t ask patients those kinds of questions.

What does this tell us? Perhaps the first thing to say is that although this is a psychoanalytic case of a very small order, it expresses the fact that psychoanalytic cases are often too amazing to be true. They are beautiful embodiments of the notion that fact is stranger than fiction. This story obviously has no evidential standing whatsoever in scientific terms. It’s just a story. In fact, it might even be fiction. Who knows? How do I know that the psychoanalyst who told me this story didn’t make it up? It certainly doesn’t conform to canons of clinical trials and randomized controls. But what it does is to make absolutely clear the motivations and the mechanisms by which an obscure illness is generated. It is predicated on the assumption that depression has a meaning; it is an inner act on the part of the patient. Where is the evidence for this, the proof? What counts as proof here is a recourse to ordinary psychological explanations, to what is sometimes called by philosophers of mind ‘folk psychology’.

The case described above also conforms perfectly to Freud’s definition of the process of melancholy, his term for depression in its relation to mourning, as set out in ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917). For Freud, depression in mourning occurs through an attack that has been displaced onto the ego rather than centring on the lost object, here the wife. Depression is an attack on myself because I do not want to attack my prized object, external to the self – someone I can no longer love or who no longer loves me, or some situation of deep importance in my erotic and general life, which gave meaning to the world but is now lost. In this case, the farmer, it seems, fell ill of his fidelity to his wife. In order to remain faithful to his wife’s words, he had to deny his own sexual needs. Importantly, he had not ‘gone with another woman’ and had remained faithful to his wife by not straying, by at least staying within his own farm. The psychoanalyst’s intervention was to say, you can separate off the question of fidelity to your wife from your living being as a sexual man.

Psychoanalysis exists not only as a therapeutic practice – one that is accepted or rejected by the medical profession – but as a player with its own independent life in the wider cultural sphere. A good example of this lies in the literally thousands of New Yorker cartoons about psychoanalysis. One of my favourites is particularly resonant for a historian of science because it sums up the three paths for psychology since the late nineteenth century. A well-dressed, bespectacled ape sits in the analyst’s chair taking notes on the brain-in-a-jar lying on the analytic couch, the couch being one of the trademark ‘tools’ of the profession. The ape alludes to the importance of evolutionary accounts of animal behaviour to the development of psychology. The brain sits in a jar, ready to be sliced open by the neuroscientists. One can imagine a scanner – a Jules Verne version of a scanner, perhaps – imaging it. And then you have the couch on which the patient relines, a position that facilitates the particular kind of free associative speech that became the basis for the psychoanalytic method. The ape, finally, is Freud – well, not quite, but he’s certainly listening to what the brain has to tell him. All three models of psychology are present here: brain science, evolutionary science and ‘talk’ science.

Such cartoons are also examples of how, through the course of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis entered popular culture, generating, along the way, not only New Yorker cartoons, but also hundreds of films, novels and advertising. Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Century of the Self (2002) presents a mass of such examples to conjure a wonderfully paranoid vision of twentieth-century culture, making much of the fact that one of the founders of advertising in the United States was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Curtis traces the close affiliation between psychoanalysis and such ‘hidden persuaders’: adverts from as early as the 1930s often allude to or use varieties of Freudian theory. The language of psychoanalysis quickly infiltrated everyday life and discourse, particularly in the English-speaking world. Freud’s use of the story of Oedipus and his ‘smutty’ interpretation of its relation to family life became near ubiquitous in the fifties, the subject of jokes as well as t-shirts. Terms such as ‘Freudian slip’ have been standard phrases since the 1930s.

Psychoanalysis, then, has diverse and multiple cultural presences. It absorbs film, literature, science, politics. If in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s psychoanalysis spread into schools, polyclinics and medico-sexual outreach programmes as various forms of psychotherapy, by the second half of the twentieth century – and particularly, to start with, in the United States – the spread of the Freudian lexicon goes hand in hand with what has become known as ‘therapy culture’. Therapy culture begins with psychotherapy but disseminates much more widely with the growth of the health and well-being industries that built gyms, proliferated heath trends and new practices (like jogging, which I date to the 1970s, though the word was introduced in 1964). Therapy culture also infiltrated other formal and informal institutions, like prisons and schools, and reached into social work, social media and even public policy.

In this way, psychoanalysis is distinct from many sciences. But like any science, it is first and foremost a body of knowledge bound together with certain practices. It is also a profession; individuals who join that profession conform to its standards, set up institutions associated with it and garner cultural capital in the process. This is true, clearly, for all scientific and medical institutions. Yet psychoanalysis also has a very different set of cultural influences, going far beyond its formal professional practitioners.

People are often perplexed by what psychoanalysis is for this reason. It goes beyond one set of institutions or one professional practice associated with elite practitioners. It doesn’t conform to the standard models of how science should behave. One could describe it as a kind of guerrilla science, or, as Gellner suggested, a new religion – or perhaps the form religion takes in a secular and scientific culture. In his Introductory Lectures, Freud wryly draws religion in to note that psychoanalysis cannot hope to compete with Lourdes, the French town famous for its miracle faith cures of fatal diseases, where Catholics have gathered to be healed since the late nineteenth century. It is true that Lourdes successes are astonishing: it really does seem to cure people of cancer and other maladies. Psychoanalysis may be playing in the same field, trying to harness psychological forces to effect extraordinary cures of both mental and physical illness. But Freud says that psychoanalysis can never compete with Lourdes. This thought raises the question of whether this may be true for biomedical science in general. If the biomedical sciences are somehow trying to rival Lourdes and find as effective a placebo, the road may prove long indeed.

There is a last point to make here briefly about the cultural status of psychoanalysis in the context of secularization. One narrative of modernity views religion losing its cultural hold and foundations in the late nineteenth century and being replaced by a hedonistic and aesthetic culture, with the subsequent ascendance of a cultural form according to which the meaning of life is beauty and pleasure. On this narrative, one might see psychoanalysis as the last phase of the European Enlightenment – the Enlightenment turned inwards. The story of psychoanalysis becomes part of the story of the production of culture in the ‘West’ after religion loses its foundations.

Psychoanalysis and science

There is another way of framing the history of psychoanalysis. Psychology develops as a discipline in three important modes during Freud’s lifetime. E. G. Boring, in his extensive A History of Experimental Psychology (1929), implicitly makes the claim that the only branch of psychology that is truly ‘scientific’ is experimental psychology, the work that takes place in laboratories and universities.5 This is typical in traditional accounts of the discipline. In an excellent historical work, Constructing the Subject (1990), Kurt Danziger turns away from these conventional assumptions, proposing instead that even if you agree that scientific psychology comes into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century, there are multiple programmes involved in its development.6

First, there is the academic programme of experimental psychology with its close ties to experimental physiology in the German universities from the 1850s onwards. Wilhelm Wundt is the founding father here. He set up the first laboratory in experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1879. Wundt’s work was based on establishing criteria of objective measurement: through experimental observation, subjective meaning was to be eliminated. But this story is immediately complicated by the problem of how to experiment in psychology. What is it that is being measured? The experimenter, after all, does something to the subject of the experiment. Let’s call this subject Nameless. The experimenter, often using a word or a signal, measures how Nameless responds. In this sense, the experiment measures through the experimenter how Nameless monitors him/herself and their reactions. Inherent to experimental psychology is a set-up that relies on a basis of training in expert self-monitoring. If you’re sticking two needles into someone’s back and trying to measure how far apart they have to be in order for the subject to be able to distinguish between the two, the subject has to become an expert on reporting sensation in the back. Psychological research is predicated on this idea: it involves training subjects to become experts. The most effective way to observe this dynamic is to repeat the experiment with the researcher and the subject having swapped seats. The two positions are completely asymmetrical. Accurately reporting one’s responses is as learnt a behaviour as setting up the experiment and asking for or documenting the response. The study of psychology requires this kind of introspection, plus laboratory observation. In the late nineteenth century, psychology and ‘introspectionism’ are seen as one and the same.

The second psychology programme to develop in this period is Galtonian psychology, named after the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s. This is a psychology of large numbers, one that surveys the characteristics and features of populations. It takes off from the development of statistics in the nineteenth century. The famous starting point for this field of study is the measuring of the height of recruits in the Scottish army. Instrumental to this measurement was the newly discovered Gaussian curve, named after the German mathematician, Karl Gauss. The foundation of this programme was to show the bell curve distribution of the properties of populations. Galton was interested in a psychology not of the individual, but of the mass. His psychology was located not in the university, but in large institutions, in factories and schools. It is closely linked to the social developments of the period. The first law requiring children to attend school until the age of 11 was passed in 1870. The Galtonian project is about these new populations and their properties, the most famous being the IQ test, which very controversially sought to measure the distribution of ‘intelligence’ across genders, races and so on.

The third kind of psychology that Danziger points to is that of clinical investigation. This is closely related to medicine. Here the influential French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s teacher in Paris, and Freud himself both play star parts. This is medical psychology – the term used in Britain until the 1920s for what is later called psychiatry. It is fundamentally based on individual cases. It differs from experimental psychology in its explanatory frameworks, which are largely statistical. Medical psychology is interested in isolating specific causal patterns, the particular origins and effects of symptoms. It draws on a medical model of causal inference that can be seen, for instance, in the developments in bacteriology in the 1880s, which established the idea that the necessary and sufficient condition for typhoid was a particular bacterium. This model is transposed onto explorations of the brain in medical psychology.

Psychoanalysis emerges as a new psychology in the early twentieth century. ‘New psychology’ is something of a slippery term, with different usages in Britain and the US. In England, it’s used from around 1915 to refer to Freud, Jung and some others. In America, it is used in the 1880s to describe experimental psychology. I am using it here in the English sense. At its most fundamental level, psychoanalysis emerges as a new psychology interested in the instinctual and the irrational. Freudian theory could essentially be described as a rational understanding of the irrational, or a rational encounter with the force of desire. Later we see the idea of ‘depth psychology’ or Tiefenpsychologie